Can't wait too see it although I think I'm a bit hesitant to jump to the latest when it shows up. Are you on latest these days, Citay, or which Z790 BIOS do you currently recommend?
I have
this Z690 board and i'm on the latest BIOS version v1H as of date. Even if a beta BIOS version with the new default settings was available there, personally i don't have an urge to update to that, since i only have an i5 CPU, and i have optimized the relevant settings such as CPU Lite Load myself already. This beta BIOS version is more for the average Joe that wants a solution from MSI without too much hassle.
I noticed a tendency of improvement when I updated to the September 2023 BIOS, which had as default the Lite Load Auto Mode 9 with AC/DC Loadline of 0.5/0.8, reasonable values. Previously, defaults were 1.1/1.1 (Jan 2023 BIOS) with a lot of heat and voltage. I further dropped it to Mode 7 0.35/0.8 for my CPU and never looked back. Never noticed any stability issue either, although I haven't tested it with Unreal Engine shader compilation, which seems to be the ultimate stability test nowadays.
Yes, by lowering CPU Lite Load yourself, you can shave off more of the voltage headroom until you arrive at your specific CPUs voltage requirements for the frequencies (then you may want to add a bit of headroom again). But to find that line between stability and instability as you lower this setting, stability testing is a must, don't just set something and hope for the best. I recommend testing with something like Prime95 Small FFTs, OCCT and the likes. 15-30 minutes of that should do.
Also I observe Intel are now recommending CEP to be active, which never was by default on my MSI board. I played around a bit and it only brings heat (14W more in CB23 at same clocks) and a minor performance decrease to 23K from around 23.6K (2.5% decrease). Unless I see any instability I find little reason to enable it just to comply with recommendations. What are your thoughts on this? Do you think not having it enabled could somehow put CPU in danger by way of more than normal current draw or otherwise?
With a 13900K, 14700K and 14900K (let alone a -KS), Intel has produced absolute monsters, so if i had one of those, i'd probably err on the side of caution and see what happens if i leave CEP enabled. See if the performance drops at some point when attempting to optimize CPU Lite Load for example. I personally don't buy such extreme CPU models because i think Intel has overdone it, and i don't want the CPU to turn into a space heater with full load. For now, having CEP enabled is only a recommendation by Intel, and we can already see that MSI (and the other brands) don't pay too much attention to recommendations, for example where's the 400A IccMax in the Tower Cooler setting...? They seem to add one "Intel" profile everywhere, but then you don't get the performance anymore that you saw in all the reviews, so i can see people wanting more than that, and then all bets are off again just like before.
And he thinks that the Intel Current Limiter mechanism kicks in way faster than the other two.
Yes, the Current Limit IccMax is working with internal peak current within the CPU and may work the fastest. It is certainly good not to allow more than 400A there, or maybe just 307A, in order to prevent any long-term degradation of the CPU. By the way, the maximum values used to be more conservative, here's from my old i5-11500:
256A was the maximum there, reasonable. Now if we look at the
screenshot from today, we see 307A on the Intel Default Setting (correct for the
Performance Profile), but then we see 512A for the Tower/Water cooler selections, way above the 400A maximum Intel explicitly states in the new recommendations.
However, if we take the power limits more of a means to not let the CPU run into thermal throttling from overtemperature, which is what i traditionally used them for in my replies, then the Current Limit might not be as consistent as setting good old Power Limits in Watts. For each CPU cooler, there is a specific CPU power draw it can handle, above which the temperatures start getting out of hand. Let's say you have a cooler that can handle 220W, with CPU temperatures staying in the mid-80°C or so. But at 240W they go above 90°C and start to approach thermal throttling. My standard recommendation was then to set 220W limits and be done with it. The cooling will always stay protected like that, and with most workloads like gaming, due to it not being full CPU load on all cores, there won't even be any performance loss.
If you set IccMax instead, it would likely be a bit more difficult to hit this spot where the cooler can still just about deal with the heat. But to be honest, having the power limits available, i haven't experimented with IccMax as a limiting tool yet.
Then, if you instead lower TJMax (Thermal Junction Maximum) from what is usually 100°C, you will simply get thermal throttling at a lower temperature already, let's say 90°C if you set that. I always think of thermal throttling as more of an emergency mechanism, as originally intended, so i feel more comfortable recommending people to set power limits instead. Power limit throttling may not differ too much from thermal throttling in the end result, but it just looks nicer in the sensors, and i don't know how some other mechanisms like Thermal Velocity Boost might get influenced by thermal throttling.
That, in a nutshell, is why i recommend setting power limits, using it as a tool to get the temperatures under control and prevent thermal throttling. Turns out that a current limit is also quite useful to set to 400A or even 307A with a high-end CPU, because the 512A that MSI allow, i don't know about that one...
R seems to be that the power limits are probably not the issue, so setting a default PL1 of 125W in MSI's latest BIOS is just gonna gimp performance and is unlikely to resolve the issue.
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